The Palette Expert Kit allows you to control your Adobe CC applications with soundboard-type controls, but it has some quirks.

Palette wants to change the way you interact with your Adobe creative apps. Its Expert Kit ($299) includes control surfaces that are not unlike those on a soundboard—sliders, wheels, and buttons. These magnetic controls can be mixed and matched to your liking, and programmed with different functions for different applications. It's an intriguing method of control, and can be beneficial to the right user, but I encountered some foibles in testing that keep me from giving it a stronger recommendation.

DesignI received the Expert Kit for review, which includes two buttons, two sliders, and three control wheels. Palette also offers a Stater Kit ($199) that includes two buttons, a slider, and a control wheel, as well as a Pro Kit ($499) with four buttons, four sliders, and six control wheels. The Pro kit is also available with a cherry wood finish for $899. Additional controls are available á la carte, with the Palette supporting up to 18 modules in total.

From an industrial design standpoint, the Expert Kit is gorgeous. The eight modules are all finished in aluminum. They each have data connection ports on all sides, with one male connection per module. Magnets lock them together, and the "brain" unit, which is a cube with a color display to let you know which control profile is loaded, has a USB port. I would have preferred a wireless connection, but that would have likely required a larger control module in order to accommodate a battery.

Even with the Expert Kit, which is a better value for those starting out than the Starter Kit, you've got plenty of room to configure the layout of the control surface. The brain that powers the Palette, as well as the buttons and dials, are all square. The sliders are rectangular, equal in size to two of the square modules stacked together. I laid the modules out in a fairly straightforward rectangular configuration.

While I like the magnetic design, I did encounter a potential flaw. At one point during a long photo editing session, I realized that the Palette had gotten a bit too close to my wireless keyboard and locked onto it magnetically—not a big deal. But I did manage to jostle it at another point, which loosened a connection point and caused the right half of the controls to stop working. I noticed that the LED borders around them were turned off and was able to reseat the connection in a matter of seconds.

App InterfaceThe Palette configuration app works with OS X 10.9 and up, as well as Windows 7 and up. It has preconfigured profiles for most of the Adobe CC suite. Palette is marketed toward photographers using Lightroom and Photoshop, but also supports video editing suites (Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Apple Final Cut Pro X) and graphic design software (Adobe Illustrator and InDesign).

The preset profiles are a good place to start, but don't feel limited by the suggested options—the software lets you assign a laundry list of adjustment settings to the Palette controls when working with Lightroom. But there aren't as many for Photoshop, and only a few for Premiere Pro. With those apps, you'll need to plug in your favorite keyboard shortcuts manually to get the most out of the Palette.

I loaded the retouching profile for Lightroom and tweaked it to my needs; I felt that it made sense to use the sliders and dials for the adjustments that I use the most. I assigned the sliders to highlight and shadow adjustment, and dedicated one wheel to exposure, another to image rotation (Crop Angle), and the third to contrast. One button was set to undo an action, and the other to toggle through the presets in my User Presets folder.

After an hour or so, I realized that I needed to tweak the configuration. Some things worked well, but others were just getting in the way of my workflow. Image rotation was a big problem in particular. When I turned the wheel, the Crop Angle tool was only making adjustments at one-degree increments—Lightroom can make much more precise adjustments than that. Also, if I had previously cropped an image to a smaller size (via the R keyboard shortcut in Lightroom), using the control dial to make an adjustment to straighten the horizon would restore the image back to its original uncropped state.

My User Preset folder proved to be quirky as well. I have four presets stored there. The assigned button is supposed to toggle between the presets in the folder, so I renamed them to go in order from my most used to least used. That way, I thought, I wouldn't have to mash the button that often. But it doesn't work like that. I'd press the button and it would apply my Kodak Ektar preset—just as I intended. But when I moved to the next photo and pressed the button again, it would go to the next preset in my list. I'd have to press it again and again and again until it looped back to my first preset. The simple solution is to only keep one preset in the folder, but that means I'll have to go digging through other folders for those times when I want to use one of my other favorites.

That's the bad. There's also good. I found that using the highlights and shadows sliders in tandem allowed me to make adjustments to photos more quickly than I could using the software interface via trackpad. I could use one hand to move them up and down, with the other turning the wheel to adjust exposure. If I were building my kit piece by piece, though, I might opt for all wheels, as the physical nature of the sliders doesn't translate well with Lightroom's image-to-image workflow. The physical slider control stays in place when I'm not using it, so if I move to another image where an adjustment hasn't yet been made, moving the slider just a bit will drastically change the value—I kept having to remember to center both of them when I started working on the next photo in sequence. Future versions of Lightroom may play a bit better with some of the controls. Just be aware that, at this point, there are some quirks.

I was concerned that I'd have to label each control to remind me of its function. Thankfully, after a few hours, my head was straight with which control surface performed which function. The app allows you to change the color of the LED border of each control, which helped. I made shadow and black adjustments show a black border (basically, the LED is turned off), the undo function is surrounded with red, and I opted for a deep blue for the User Presets button. The others I left at default, which is a light blue.

Of course, you can configure multiple control interfaces for a single app using the Palette software. That's a plus if you're performing different tasks in the same program. And the kit automatically detects which program you're using and switches the profile, assuming you've got it loaded in one of the Palette application's tabs. If you're going back and forth between Photoshop and Lightroom, you don't have to manually swap profiles—that's a plus.

If you want to use the control surface with apps that aren't supported, you can manually map keystrokes to different controls. And you can set it to work with your Web browser or with iTunes for when you're not editing photos or video.

ConclusionsThe physical control interface of the Palette isn't for everyone. I can say that, after a solid day of editing photos, I'm going to stick with my usual keyboard and trackpad combo. There are definitely some advantages to having slider and dial controls at the ready, but not enough for me to justify the cost. That's not saying the Expert Kit isn't a good product—it's nicely made, easy to configure, and the modular design lends itself to the customizability that many creative types desire. If you like the idea of the Palette, it will likely make you happy.

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About the Author

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007. He honed his writing skills at re... See Full Bio

Palette Expert Kit

Palette Expert Kit

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